Giuseppe Concordia

Concordia Giuseppe (Asigliano 09/02/1882 - Vercelli 20/03/1962): the son of a farmer, saw puppets for the first time in a show given in Asigliano by the Giacomo Colla company and was very struck by the mask of Famiola who would later become the main character of his own theatre. He became part of an amateur dramatics company which he began managing in 1903: after some time the company went bankrupt and Giuseppe founded his first puppet company, together with Giuseppe Sereno (painter) and Giuseppe Lavarino (carpenter).

The première was Famiola Maestro di musica, but it was a flop, and Giuseppe’s colleagues left him. Despite this, he continued his activity and in 1905 he met and married Tersite Benente, the daughter of Romeo, a puppeteer who was one of Pio Rame’s teachers. This event marked the transition for Giuseppe from an amateur to a professional puppeteer. In the company, at first there was also Thersite’s brother, Emilio, who was to die during the Libyan campaign.

The main character of the company remained Famiola, but the repertoire was enriched both by canonical performances from the puppet tradition (to which fantastic elements were sometimes added), and by operas and operettas, as well as by variety and circus numbers.

The following titles were part of the repertoire: I gnomi luminosi, Berengario, Il guerriero nero, Le valige del Negus, La conquista dell’aria, La sorella dell’arabo, La forza del destino, Il paese dei campanelli, Fra Diavolo .

Thersite died in 1918 leaving, in addition to her husband, her children Esther, Lutualdo, Dolores and Germinale.

The area in which the Concordia company worked was always the north-west of the peninsula, that is, Piedmont, Liguria, Lombardy, and Emilia.

n 1923, Vittorio Podrecca contacted Giuseppe to join the “Teatro dei Piccoli”, but he preferred to beat his own path alone.

In the 1950s, he retired from the scene and also his son Lutualdo, who had his own company, a few years later had to stop the activity which by then could no longer stand up to the competition from cinema and television. In 1967, all of the company’s material was donated by the Concordia family to Giordano Ferrari.